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Deep dives into design thinking, creative process, and the intersection of business and aesthetics.
They're only cheap on day one.
You can buy a cheap website for a few hundred euro, and a freelancer marketplace will find you someone who'll do it for less. You get a domain name and a contact form, you tick the box marked "online presence", and you get back to something more pressing.
For some businesses that's a sensible decision. If your work comes through a handful of long-standing relationships and the website only has to prove you exist, there's no point spending more than you need to. The trouble starts when a business that relies on its website for enquiries buys one on the same terms. The low price is real, but most of what the site costs you arrives later, and none of it comes with an invoice.
What you pay for it, and what it costs you to own
It helps to separate two numbers. One is what you pay the developer. The other is what the site costs you over the next couple of years, including the business it loses and the work it creates.
On a cheap site the first number is small, which is the whole appeal. The second is where it goes wrong. There's the business you lose because the site is slow or awkward on a phone, which is hard to see and easy to underestimate. Then there's the rebuild, which tends to come round sooner than anyone planned, because the site has become too fragile to change and the only way forward is to pay for the whole project again. One lost client can cost more than the site did, so it doesn't take much for the sums to turn against you.
Most of the damage is quiet
A cheap website rarely fails in a way anyone notices. It loses business slowly, and you never see the client who gave up halfway down the page, or the enquiry that was never sent.
Some of the leak is mechanical. Budget builds tend to sit on heavy, all-purpose themes and poorly set-up hosting, so pages crawl on a mobile connection and people leave before they've seen what you do. A contact form that's clumsy, or that asks for too much, loses more of them at the last step. None of it is dramatic enough to stand out in a monthly report, which is why it goes on for so long.
The rest is credibility. If you sell a premium service and the website looks like a school project, the buyer can't square the two, and they start to doubt you before you've spoken. Your sales team then inherits the problem. Instead of picking up where the website left off, they spend the first part of every call earning back the trust the site cost you.
Why cheap websites get harder to live with
These sites don't deteriorate at random. The causes are usually in how they were built.
The first is that there's no real content model. The site is hard-coded, or made in a visual page builder where the design and the words are stuck together. Changing a headline can break a layout. Updating something in the footer means editing it by hand on every page. Before long the site feels so fragile that nobody wants to touch it, and a site nobody updates goes stale quickly.
Templates cause the second problem. A developer working to a low price will often start from a rigid template, which is fine until you need something it wasn't designed to do. You want a case studies section, say, and the template only knows how to show blog posts. Now you're choosing between a workaround and a rebuild.
The third is plugins. Without the time to write code, a budget developer adds a plugin for each feature, one for the slider and another for the form. A couple of years in there are dozens of them, maintained by different people and updated on different schedules. Sooner or later two of them conflict, and every one is a possible security hole and a bit more weight on each page.
A sensible minimum for a site you depend on
If your website is how new business finds you, there's a baseline below which the project isn't worth doing.
It should be fast on a phone and pass the Core Web Vitals thresholds, because speed is one of the things search engines take into account when ranking pages, as well as something visitors feel straight away. It should meet WCAG AA for accessibility, which reduces your legal risk and means the site works for more of the people who visit it. And it should be built from reusable components, a small design system in effect, so sections can be added or reordered without anyone breaking the code.
Budget for what the site has to do
A lot of website conversations start with the price of a five-page site. Pages are the wrong unit. Ask instead what it would take to build a site that brings your cost per enquiry down, and you end up comparing quotes on something that matters.
What the extra spend buys on a good site is fairly concrete. Speed helps both your search visibility and the share of visitors who go on to enquire. Clear structure and copy mean buyers arrive at the first call already understanding what you do, so sales conversations get shorter. A site built to be maintained doesn't need replacing in two years. And you own it: the code and the content are yours to keep or take elsewhere.
Four questions that show where the corners were cut
If a quote looks too good to be true, these will tell you where the saving came from.
"How will we add a new service next year without redesigning pages?" If the answer is "we'll just duplicate a page", nothing reusable has been built.
"How will you show us the site's performance and accessibility are right?" You want a Lighthouse report or a specific accessibility audit. If they don't know what those are, that tells you plenty.
"Who owns the site and the hosting account?" Make sure you're not renting space on a proprietary builder you can never move away from.
"Who keeps it updated and secure after launch, and what does that involve?" Every site needs someone looking after it, whether or not the quote mentions it.
None of this makes the most expensive quote the right one. Put the same questions to every supplier, and pay particular attention to how the cheapest one answers.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website strategy and build services · View completed case studies · See website project details
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.
They're only cheap on day one.
You can buy a cheap website for a few hundred euro, and a freelancer marketplace will find you someone who'll do it for less. You get a domain name and a contact form, you tick the box marked "online presence", and you get back to something more pressing.
For some businesses that's a sensible decision. If your work comes through a handful of long-standing relationships and the website only has to prove you exist, there's no point spending more than you need to. The trouble starts when a business that relies on its website for enquiries buys one on the same terms. The low price is real, but most of what the site costs you arrives later, and none of it comes with an invoice.
What you pay for it, and what it costs you to own
It helps to separate two numbers. One is what you pay the developer. The other is what the site costs you over the next couple of years, including the business it loses and the work it creates.
On a cheap site the first number is small, which is the whole appeal. The second is where it goes wrong. There's the business you lose because the site is slow or awkward on a phone, which is hard to see and easy to underestimate. Then there's the rebuild, which tends to come round sooner than anyone planned, because the site has become too fragile to change and the only way forward is to pay for the whole project again. One lost client can cost more than the site did, so it doesn't take much for the sums to turn against you.
Most of the damage is quiet
A cheap website rarely fails in a way anyone notices. It loses business slowly, and you never see the client who gave up halfway down the page, or the enquiry that was never sent.
Some of the leak is mechanical. Budget builds tend to sit on heavy, all-purpose themes and poorly set-up hosting, so pages crawl on a mobile connection and people leave before they've seen what you do. A contact form that's clumsy, or that asks for too much, loses more of them at the last step. None of it is dramatic enough to stand out in a monthly report, which is why it goes on for so long.
The rest is credibility. If you sell a premium service and the website looks like a school project, the buyer can't square the two, and they start to doubt you before you've spoken. Your sales team then inherits the problem. Instead of picking up where the website left off, they spend the first part of every call earning back the trust the site cost you.
Why cheap websites get harder to live with
These sites don't deteriorate at random. The causes are usually in how they were built.
The first is that there's no real content model. The site is hard-coded, or made in a visual page builder where the design and the words are stuck together. Changing a headline can break a layout. Updating something in the footer means editing it by hand on every page. Before long the site feels so fragile that nobody wants to touch it, and a site nobody updates goes stale quickly.
Templates cause the second problem. A developer working to a low price will often start from a rigid template, which is fine until you need something it wasn't designed to do. You want a case studies section, say, and the template only knows how to show blog posts. Now you're choosing between a workaround and a rebuild.
The third is plugins. Without the time to write code, a budget developer adds a plugin for each feature, one for the slider and another for the form. A couple of years in there are dozens of them, maintained by different people and updated on different schedules. Sooner or later two of them conflict, and every one is a possible security hole and a bit more weight on each page.
A sensible minimum for a site you depend on
If your website is how new business finds you, there's a baseline below which the project isn't worth doing.
It should be fast on a phone and pass the Core Web Vitals thresholds, because speed is one of the things search engines take into account when ranking pages, as well as something visitors feel straight away. It should meet WCAG AA for accessibility, which reduces your legal risk and means the site works for more of the people who visit it. And it should be built from reusable components, a small design system in effect, so sections can be added or reordered without anyone breaking the code.
Budget for what the site has to do
A lot of website conversations start with the price of a five-page site. Pages are the wrong unit. Ask instead what it would take to build a site that brings your cost per enquiry down, and you end up comparing quotes on something that matters.
What the extra spend buys on a good site is fairly concrete. Speed helps both your search visibility and the share of visitors who go on to enquire. Clear structure and copy mean buyers arrive at the first call already understanding what you do, so sales conversations get shorter. A site built to be maintained doesn't need replacing in two years. And you own it: the code and the content are yours to keep or take elsewhere.
Four questions that show where the corners were cut
If a quote looks too good to be true, these will tell you where the saving came from.
"How will we add a new service next year without redesigning pages?" If the answer is "we'll just duplicate a page", nothing reusable has been built.
"How will you show us the site's performance and accessibility are right?" You want a Lighthouse report or a specific accessibility audit. If they don't know what those are, that tells you plenty.
"Who owns the site and the hosting account?" Make sure you're not renting space on a proprietary builder you can never move away from.
"Who keeps it updated and secure after launch, and what does that involve?" Every site needs someone looking after it, whether or not the quote mentions it.
None of this makes the most expensive quote the right one. Put the same questions to every supplier, and pay particular attention to how the cheapest one answers.
Related Brainstorm services and work
Website strategy and build services · View completed case studies · See website project details
Updated 24 September 2026. Dave Curtin, founder and Creative Director of Brainstorm, leads website strategy, brand direction and technical delivery for Brainstorm clients.